This Book Is A Planetarium
Kelli Anderson reinvents the way we look at a book. The author uses her graphic design skills to provide kids and adults a different kind of reading adventure. Anderson’s This Book is a Planetarium: And Other Extraordinary Pop-Up Contraptions is a 5-page literature. It demonstrates abstract concepts instead of merely explaining them.
The book features 6 elaborate and well-crafted pop-ups. They translate abstract physical laws into hands-on demonstrations of magical proportions. There is the Planetarium pop-up that helps demonstrate how light travels in the universe. The glowing dome features some of the more popular constellations and other stellar bodies of the cosmos.
There’s a guitar-inspired musical instrument pop-up. This helps demonstrate the process of producing sound through vibrations in the air. It should provide enough background knowledge for the creation of other musical instruments. The Decoder Ring pop-up is perfect for those who have a fascination for encryption technologies. This contraption introduces individuals to the complex world of codes.
For individuals who are lost as to how calendars work, This Book is a Planetarium offers a simplified demonstration of how people put units into calendars. The perpetual calendar works like a wheel that cycles through the different smaller units. There is also a Spiralgraph pop-up that can help stimulate the artistic side of an individual. The Speaker pop-up is best for folks who want to understand the amplification of natural sound. This should help provide the foundation for tinkering with one’s existing speaker setup.
This Book is a Planetarium is not a book per se. It is an adventure that provides answers to some of the mysteries in the universe. It does not claim to answer them all. What the book promises are a better and clearer understanding of some of the abstract concepts that we experience every day.
